It’s always a shock to the system. Leave the state for a handful of days in March and return to a very different place. Cool and glorious one minute, hot and yellow the next. Oh yeah, I live in Florida! Spring = heat + pollen.

It was sad. Almost pathetic. There I stood in the light bulb aisle of the hardware store. An entire aisle of insanity stared down at me. Laughing at me. Taunting me. “Hahaha. Whatcha’ gonna’ pick, silly man?”

I didn’t know. I was a humbled doofus. A HUMBLED doofus! I had hit rock bottom.

The only thing that made me feel any better were the two guys standing there with me. One was growing visibly frustrated. Like he might start throwing bulbs. “Halogen!” he mumbled to himself. “No, no, no. I don’t want halogen!”

I am using my column this week to officially request proposals from top inventors around the world who are prepared to bring to market (and more importantly, me!) a product that will revolutionize landscaping forever. The proposal I am requesting is for the world’s first — wait for it — Pop-Up Yard™. (That’s good, right? A yard that you can buy to replace your own brown, weed-ridden, unkempt winter yard. Don’t try to steal the idea. It’s trademarked.)

“So, do you have any goals for 42?” my wife asked me over dinner. She and my daughter had taken me out to celebrate the day of my birth, some 42 years ago. Forty-two is an odd, neither-here-nor-there age.

Basically, the only thing that happens when you turn 42 is boring, mundane stuff — you take up eating barbecue potato chips; you have conversations about mutual fund expense ratios and you start to ponder deep, universal questions like: Why do we have concrete AND asphalt roads?

I’m sorry our cold isn’t really cold, but the fact is, I’m still cold, and I’m not sorry about that.

This is the lament of a Floridian every winter. How we poor, wretched, warmth-deprived beings have to fear how our commentary on the temperature will be taken the wrong way if mentioned in the wrong company.

Know what I’m talking about? Happened to mention to a visitor from up north how you feel about our weather — even casually. “How am I doing? Well, it’s cold enough outside to freeze the freckles right off my body!,” I will say.

My daughter and I will have to come to terms with something pretty soon. For her, she will have to understand that for much of her life I’ve been mostly letting her win at games, or at least giving her a fair chance. Parents do that, right? Don’t want to discourage their children, so they let off the gas. Give them a shot. Feign exasperation as they’re completely dismantled by their little one. It happens.

But me, I will have to come to terms with the fact that she’s 9 years old now and none of that matters anymore. Those days are gone.

It took me a moment. Or a few. It always does. We had walked down to the churchyard to knock the soccer ball around. That was the promise from my daughter. The plan.

“Want to kick the soccer ball?” I distinctly remember her asking. She knows I’m a sucker for it. Like an overly excited dog who learns he’s going to the beach. “YEAH! YEAH! YEAH! Oh no, I just wet myself.”

She got a World Cup replica ball for Christmas — a swerving wave of color that screams, “kick the stitches out of me, will ya?”

It’s like the flu. Spreading. Overcoming. Pummeling us into some sloth-like state where we slump around, dragging ourselves out of bed each morning and answering every question with a mopey, “I don’t care!”

“Here’s that $1 million you won in the lottery.”

“Nope! I don’t care!”

It’s the January blues.

Got ‘em? Feel em? Hard not to when the holidays are over, the weather’s turned cold, gray and gloomy, and your credit card melted from overuse.